Sewer project causing headaches on Osprey Avenue

A crushed main, an injured worker and other setbacks haven't pushed back the completion date of Lift Station 7's replacement, though

By ROBERT ECKHART

— Work crews had barely started on a $12.5 million sewer construction job near downtown when the weight of an excavator crushed a buried section of old 14-inch sewer main.

Fast-flowing sewage seeped into the 21-foot-deep pit the excavator was digging, filling it with stinky muck while workers scrambled to a shut off valve.

It was one of a handful of early setbacks for a big and complex job that is off to a rocky start.

Workers are placing a half-mile of pipe up to 25 feet underground as they build a three-story underground complex that will move 30 percent of the city's sewage.

The new facility will replace the city's biggest, most notorious, sewage lift station — Lift Station No. 7 on Pomelo Avenue, which stank to high heaven, was prone to breakdowns and garnered all kinds of complaints from neighbors. It is the lift station blamed for spilling more than a million gallons of effluent into Hudson Bayou since 2004.

Replacing old No. 7 has been a headache, too.

So far, problems and construction delays have not driven up the price or pushed back the completion date of October 2012, city officials say.

For many, the biggest inconvenience is the daily traffic jam on northbound lanes of Orange Avenue. When it is bad, the cars at the intersection of Orange and Mound Street back up for a mile because the construction crews have closed stretch of parallel-running Osprey Avenue.

Osprey was supposed to reopen after Thanksgiving, just in time for tourist season. That has been pushed back to at least March, when the winter visitors start to pack up and head back north.

City records show that neighbors are mostly supportive, though they intermittently complain of hammering sounds in the night brought on by an emergency, or of the perpetual traffic snarl on Orange.

"When people complain to me about traffic on Orange, which is terrible, I just say, 'Do you want this thing fixed or not?'" says Susan Chapman, a local attorney who led a neighborhood push to expose problems with the old lift station. "Maybe I'm not being very sympathetic, but my feeling is we wanted it moved, so let's just get it moved and get it over with."

Unexpected obstacles

The new lift station is about a half-mile from the old one, connected to the city's system with a new 36-inch sewer main that will run 20 to 30 feet underground, lodged in hard-packed silt underneath Osprey Avenue and Hudson Bayou.

Palmetto-based Huxted Tunneling was hired to install the pipe using a remote-controlled micro-tunneling machine. The machine is a cylinder 42 inches in diameter and 13 feet long with a cutter in front that chews up hunks of rock and then grinds them down.

"Think of it as putting a rock in a food processor," says Maurer Ellen Maurer, the city's project engineer.

To get the tunneling machine into position, they dug a 21-foot-deep launch pit. The hydraulic jacks that push the machine through the ground can exert 800,000 pounds of force.

But it turned out that the hard-packed silt under Osprey Avenue is pretty tough, too. It looks and acts more like rock than anyone expected, and one of the cutting tools on the grinder broke off after just a few days of excavation.

That led to a two-month delay. Crews had to dig another pit to pull the machine out of the ground, and by the time all the engineers had signed off on a fix-it plan, they were two months behind.

Now the tunneling machine is cruising underground at the rate of about 40 feet per day, placing pipe under the bayou.

But just as the tunneling started back up, a worker above-ground was injured when a plywood and steel concrete form toppled onto him, fracturing his spine.

After being flown to Blake Medical Center for treatment, the worker is home recuperating and expected to make a full recovery, Maurer said.

Then in mid-November an unrelated sewer spill on Gulfstream Avenue caused another emergency at the construction site, where crews had to quickly install a bypass line to help alleviate the flow to downtown.

A relatively uneventful month has passed since then, and as the crews make steady progress, Huxted has received permission to do some tunneling on Saturdays to make up for lost time.

And Maurer has turned her attention to the signal at Orange Avenue and Mound Street. She is hoping to extend the green light for northbound lanes of Orange Avenue for at least a few seconds to help with the daily traffic jams.

That's an effort that has been slowed by the installation of a new two-county traffic management system.

Maurer said the signal change could happen within the next few months, if the state transportation department signs off on it.